Manchester City, Oldham Athletic And Promise Of Fan Power

Three decades ago Manchester City and Oldham Athletic met on the final day of the season.

The clash saw City run out 5-2 winners, but the real prize for both clubs was a place in the inaugural Premier League season the following year.

Boosted by some serious investment from Rupert Murdoch’s new pay-TV channel Sky, the breakaway competition offered the promise of seriously increased revenue.

But as the anniversary of the Premier League’s inception approaches the outlook for the North West England neighbors couldn’t be more different.

Oldham Athletic have just been relegated from the lowest professional division of the English game, while Manchester City is fighting to retain their league title as well as trying to go one better than last season and become European champions.

Why did these two clubs take such different paths?

One essentially won the lottery when it came to ownership and the other did not.

The 2008 takeover of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family with access to untold riches, has meant the club has rarely had to think about debt or, some would argue, turning a profit for over a decade.

A banner hangs in the clubs gleaming Etihad stadium, the upgraded facility it moved to around a decade after its Premier League clash with the Latics, thanking Mansour for the success his investment has brought the club.

As relegation from League 2 was confirmed, Oldham fans also displayed a banner directed at its owner that read ‘GET OUT OF OUR CLUB.’

Not content with unfurling the message in the stands, supporters invaded the pitch and forced the game to be abandoned.

Risking it all

Oldham fans are far from alone in expressing dissatisfaction with the people who own their club.

Across England, at any one time, there are scores of teams where supporters are calling for regime change.

Most of these examples exist in the lower echelons of the game, at clubs that are the heartbeat of a small town and have few followers traveling to watch them play. In the worst cases, fans are fighting for the survival of the clubs that they support.

And while financial instability has always been part of the English game, in the past few years things have got even harder for smaller teams.

Many of the problems can be traced back to the formation of the Premier League.

One of the biggest consequences of the deal with Sky was that people didn’t leave the house to watch soccer regularly anymore.

It became easier than ever to follow Manchester United or Arsenal from the comfort of your own home and it didn’t matter whether you lived in Cornwall or Scotland.

This meant fewer people followed their local lower league club and year-on-year it has become harder to make these organizations viable businesses.

Even at the highest level, soccer remains a difficult game to make money from, as revenue has risen so have wages and margins are razor-thin.

As a result, especially lower down the divisions, the people queuing up to own clubs aren’t always the right ones for the job.

Finding the right owner can be difficult, even Derby County, a former English league champion, with a state-of-the-art stadium and huge area to draw in supporters has undergone a protracted sale from administration.

The previous owner Mel Morris has taken a lot of flack for the club’s plight, but many of the seeds of the club’s decline came from his desire to elevate the club to a higher division.

Derby’s demise is emblematic of the risks many clubs take to reach the Premier League, where financial sustainability can be more easily twinned with aspiration.

The problem is that the desire to reach the highest levels of the game often sees clubs risks that threaten their very existence.

So what is the solution?

Well, in a historic move in the English game’s more than 100-year history, the UK government has decided regulation is the answer.

It has announced it will introduce a “strong, independent regulator established with statutory backing to deliver financial sustainability throughout the national game.”

New laws will give this body the power to “exercise financial oversight of clubs, including information gathering, investigation and enforcement powers.”

Efforts to improve financial sustainability will focus on a more equitable distribution of wealth across the divisions and a beefed-up assessment of an owner’s “integrity.”

At this stage, it’s difficult to know just how hands-on the regulator will be, the British government has said it would prefer it if soccer’s existing governing bodies made efforts to resolve this issues itself, but given the laissez-faire approach the game has had to reform it is surely only a matter of time before the will of the regulator is tested.

The rhetoric from the Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries is certainly that if the current authorities want to retain their power they’ll need to get their act together.

“For too long the football authorities have collectively been unable to tackle some of the biggest issues in the game,” she said, “we are now committed to fundamental reform, putting football on a more sustainable financial path, strengthening corporate governance of clubs and increasing the influence fans have in the running of the national game.”

The last point made by Dorries will probably be the one most welcomed by those that love the game.

For the vast majority of the hundred-odd years that soccer has existed in the UK, the wishes of supporters have been of little concern to the people who owned their teams.

The next promise the government has made is that it will set out steps to enable a greater role for fans in the day-to-day running of clubs. These include examining mechanisms like having a ‘shadow board’ to give fans a greater voice.

It’s bold and transformative, but time will tell whether it becomes a reality.

If it does then fans will be able to go a lot further than displaying a banner to express their support or opposition to an owner.